Month: August 2020

No More Mister Nice Guy

America, Government, Media, Politics, Society & Culture

Got home late Wednesday and turned on the third night of the Republican Convention coverage. Watching the live feed from C-Span I was struck, as many have already pointed out, by the high production values of the broadcast (that’s a synonym for stagecraft, which in turn is media-speak for the skills and techniques used in the enhancement of motion picture or television productions). For grins and giggles I flipped over to first, MSNBC, then CNN to see what they were saying.

I wanted to throw up. The sniveling, the dismissiveness, the mischaracterizations, the “don’t listen to them, look at this shiny object over here” deception, the projection of everything the Left has been saying and doing onto the RNC speakers…it was infuriating.

Whether or not you thought the administration of the oath of citizenship the night before or the speech given by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo from Jerusalem were theater, for the Leftists to cry and gnash their teeth that these were “political stunts” made me yell at the screen, “You are the MASTERS of political stunts…you ought to know!” Please see Exhibits A, B, C and D: the spying on the Trump campaign, the Russia collusion hoax, the pathetic and treasonous impeachment nonsense, and the Kavanaugh character assassination, just to cite a few premier examples of the Left’s political stunt production!

I relished the thought that for once, the GOP had taken the gloves off and started to fight fire with fire. I also thought…”You can dish it out Democrats, but you just can’t take it can you?”

It was as if I was standing on the side of the path leading down to the gates of Hell, watching with revulsion a hydra with all but its last head severed, writhing back and forth as flames surrounded it and it strained against an invisible force pushing it back down into its black hole in the earth. The Left is that hydra, and while it may not be completely dead after November 3rd, it will, I predict, be wringing its claws and licking its wounds for a long time into the future.

I recently had a conversation with a Brit living here in the U.S. who, though a conservative, finds the demagoguery and mud-slinging of the current campaigns detestable, or in her words, “bad form”. “Why”, she asked, “can’t the politicians simply state what they have done or will do, how it will benefit their constituents, and avoid all the trash-talking?” “Why won’t the GOP take the High Road.”

I calmly explained that the Republican Party has been taking the High Road for 40 years plus years. But though using reason, logic, espousing patriotism, traditional values and motivated largely by wanting to do what is right for this country, the GOP has fallen further and further behind the Left in the court of public opinion. The Left’s production values, in recasting their deceit, hypocrisy and antipathy towards the values and principles that made the United States great as something GOOD rather than the evil it actually is, has brainwashed, warped the thinking of and created a false reality that is bought only by the holier-than-thou-the-rules-don’t-apply-to-me-cocktails-in-hand Hollywood, Tech-land and Wall Street elites, the naive snowflakes of Gen Z, the permanently dependent, the self-made losers and victims looking for the next free Obama-phone. In recent years they have numbered just about half of the population, unbelievably. Trump, bull-in-a-china-shop disrupter, New York real-estate thug, street-fighter and counter-puncher, who, like the Democrats, doesn’t care what people think of him personally, was precisely the kind of candidate in 2016 who could take on and defeat the Leftist/Clinton machine.

In 2020, I explained, the Left having had their butts handed to them in 2016 and learned something from it, have pulled out all the stops…in fact, they will stop at NOTHING, to try to avoid their writhing, thrashing, wailing, burning retreat into the black place from which they emanated.

Civility, decorum, good manners, understatement, “rising above it all” be damned. The Right has to fight and if that means descending into the muck with the Left and throwing the BS flag whenever they spout garbage so be it. The future for our kids and grand kids was at stake in 2016. We won that battle, but the stakes are even greater in 2020.

So the answer to the question as to why the GOP can’t take the High Road this time is embodied in the coffee cup quip…

“No more mister nice guy!”

Analog vs. Digital

America, Entertainment, Society & Culture, Technology

When was the last time you listened to a phonograph record, a nice clean one without pops and scrapes? I hadn’t in years but the other day I dusted off my old turntable and put on my now antique Moody Blues, “Days of Future Passed” album. Some of you may recall it was one of the first that blended psychedelic rock with backing from a classical orchestra.

As the opening score of “Dawn is a Feeling” diffused through the room, I suddenly remembered why God gave us ears! The sound of the analog recording, with its rich textures, melodic undertones and overtones, its depth and the haunting strings punctuated by the brass… honest to goodness made me misty. “Cold hearted orb, that rules the night…”

The clarity, the smoothness, the absence of that over-produced tininess that accompanies all the stuff coming off Pandora, was jarring. 

I thought to myself, “We’ve become so accustomed to the digital and systems-driven world we’ve forgotten how superior the analog one is!” The shortcomings of the digital world are manifest everywhere. Think of how good it is to actually reach a human being once you’ve gotten through voice-mail jail? Or how good a hamburger on the grill tastes compared with what you get from the drive-up window.

The Wall Street Journal had an op-ed the other day with the title “Why Are There Still Not Enough Paper Towels?” The crux of the answer is that systems and digital, just-in-time manufacturing results in the slimmest inventories of everything from paper towels to automobile parts. When there is a surge in demand, such as with the pandemic, manufacturing simply cannot keep up.

Alas, therein is the consequence of moving from an analog to digital society. Hyper efficiency and the quest to maximize profit results in bare shelves when a virus explodes demand for hand sanitizer and toilet paper.

Can or should we move back to a kindler, gentler world, one where we don’t try to extract maximum utility from every minute of every day using apps and robotic shelf stocking?

Regrettably, it ain’t gonna happen. Gen Z doesn’t know what an LP sounds like, and frankly, wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the original analog recording of “Nights in White Satin” and the compressed, 44k sampled digital version emanating from their ear buds.

From spraying artificial flowers with fake flower scent, which means you can make a philodendron smell like jasmine…to almond milk which tastes kind of like real milk, the virtual world is becoming the REAL WORLD.

“So what”, you say?

Well, find yourself a stereo turntable hooked up to a McIntosh tube amplifier and a pair of quality, vintage speakers, put on a pristine 33 1/3 LP of “Days of Future Passed”, sit back, close your eyes and listen.

THAT’S what.

Their Platform is Chaos

America, Education, Government, Health Care, Media, Politics, Reason, Religion, Science, Society & Culture, Technology, Values

Who but limousine liberals unaffected by government policy either through exemption (e.g. Leftist politicians) or due to inoculating wealth (e.g. Hollywood celebrities or tech tycoons)… the intellectually indolent, the perpetual victims, the “low information voters” as Rush Limbaugh calls them (a euphemism for illiterate or cerebrally lazy people easily swayed by demagoguery), the race-baiters or the grievance acolytes… could possibly support the Democrats in 2020?

Really, no-one who has any self-respect – who cares about principles such as meritocracy, excellence, achievement, probity, self-reliance, self-determination, traditional sexual identification, traditional education, traditional family structure, that life (or at least the potential of life) begins at conception, that there is a God (or at a minimum a set of eternal rules of right and wrong that are immutable and transcend all generations)…could support the Democrats in 2020!

I had a conversation the other day with my Board-certified internist during my annual physical exam who, when asked for his opinion on the Wuhan Virus pandemic, started to recite the scripts of WHO, CDC, AMA, Johns Hopkins, and other canned platitudes. Little did he know at first that I spent several years running an early intervention healthcare company based on epidemiological research. When I began to confront him, gently mind you as he was about to check my prostate, with the emerging evidence that the Wuhan plague/pandemic is no worse than a bad flu and cited evidence of how faulty is so much of the data on which decisions are being made and regulations being promulgated, did he start to back off and admit that “we just don’t know.”

I was going to let him off the hook until he said, “I’m concerned, however, about the Second Wave.” At that, I asked him the question, “What is the metric that will allow kids to go back to school normally, that will allow us to stop wearing face diapers, that will signal an end to the crisis?” I was gratified that he conceded that should the Democrats prevail in the coming election, everything will all be over beginning November 4th, not because he’ll vote Republican, but because it was an admission that most of what underpins the rhetoric and discourse is political.  I then ran down the list of disastrous economic and societal consequences the government response at all levels has wrought and then, fortunately, found common ground with him as we delved into a cost-benefit discussion and both agreed that rational decision making and critical thinking was sorely needed.

My half hour session went an hour. A nurse had to bang on the door of the exam room to remind my Doc he had another patient waiting.

As I left the office I got to wondering about how it is that a highly-educated, highly-skilled physician could be persuaded to lazily rely on and spout institutional pablum. I concluded that the damage caused to all our institutions: medical, educational, social, religious, economic, even family structures has created so much chaos that even the smartest among us are overwhelmed by the tsunami of, frankly, BS that has invaded every facet of our lives. Out of sheer enervation even the strongest of us have had to pause from the fight to catch our breath. Meanwhile, the ability of the Left to sew chaos through outright deceit, lies, projection (especially projection) and carpet-bombing with idiocy has continued unabated. The megaphone in the hands of the Leftist media, regrettably, doesn’t take much electrical power.

This is precisely what the Left wants to do. Create so much chaos that only THEY can fix things. Only THEY will be able to unravel the mess…so long as they are granted unlimited power to do so. For that is their goal…POWER! I didn’t used to believe it. I thought there were Democrats who were classic liberals, who believed in the American way of life but wanted to ensure that we looked after those who truly were less fortunate, were REAL victims… No more. Now the Democrats just lust for power as they arrogantly, absurdly believe that if they control everything and everyone they’ll move us all toward their utopian fantasy. That fantasy is the stuff of socialism/communism and while they know it’s a fantasy, it isn’t about actually creating a utopia. It’s about POWER, the thing Leftist politicians must have much as water or oxygen.

We must shake off our weariness and continue to fight to expose the Left’s dysfunctional, delusional, adolescent enchantment with and pipe-dream of utopia and their deplorable thirst for power.

In a small way, having that extended conversation with my doctor made me feel like I was able to get off a few rounds in that fight.

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